“O Himmlisch Licht!”

Abstract

In Godard's Le Mépris [Contempt, 1963], Fritz Lang, playing a fictional version of himself, evokes the complex relationship between cinema's future and the end of cinema by citing a famous verse from the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin, according to which what counts in respect of poetry is henceforth no longer the secret persistence of the gods, nor their covert proximity, but their enduring absence. This paper explores the implications of that insight as they come to affect first Godard's film, then the three films based on Hölderlin's works directed by Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub between 1986 and 1992: Der Tod des Empedokles [The Death of Empedocles]; Schwarze Sünde [Black Sin]; and Die Antigone des Sophokles nach der Hölderlinschen Übertragung für die Bühne bearbeitet von Brecht (Suhrkamp Verlag, 1948) [Sophocles’ Antigone Based on Hölderlin's Translation, as Adapted for the Stage by Brecht (published by Suhrkamp, 1948)]. At issue in all those films, and similarly in Straub and Huillet's 1974 film of Schoenberg's Moses und Aron, is the tension between the project or dream of sacrifice as a form of fusional politico-religious redemption and its very impossibility as such, attributable (among others) to the necessary subordination of film to spatio-temporal differentiation and, by that token, to what is irreducible to the visible and the invisible alike. Through careful analysis of Huillet and Straub's filmmaking strategy, the paper examines both the aesthetic and political consequences of their interruption of the logic of sacrifice, and seeks to show how the future of cinema is not reducible to the aesthetics of the spectacular but is inseparable from the promise of that which, before or beyond spectacle, has not yet ever been seen before.

Keywords:

• Straub–Huillet
• Hölderlin
• Godard
• sacrifice
• Schoenberg

Notes

Notes

1 See Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 2005) 307. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.

2 Jean-Luc Nancy, L’Évidence du film/The Evidence of Film, trans. Christine Irizarry and Verena Andermatt Conley (Paris: Klincksieck, 2007) 78–79; translation modified.

3 André Bazin, Qu’est-ce que le cinéma? (Paris: Cerf, 1985) 273.

4 See André Malraux, Œuvres complètes, 5 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1989–2004) IV: 8–9.

5 Maurice Blanchot, L’Amitié (Paris: Gallimard, 1971) 48, 50–51. I discuss Godard's use of this passage in “‘A Form that Thinks’: Godard, Blanchot, Citation” in For Ever Godard, eds. Michael Temple, James S. Williams, and Michael Witt (London: Black Dog, 2004) 396–415, 435–37.

6 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte 350.

7 Guy Debord, Œuvres (Paris: Gallimard, 2006) 767; emphasis in original.

8 See Michel Faucheux, Auguste et Louis Lumière (Paris: Gallimard, 2011) 118–19.

9 For a detailed listing of Straub and Huillet's work, see Barton Byg, Landscapes of Resistance: The German Films of Danièle Huillet and Jean-Marie Straub (Berkeley: U of California P, 1995), available <http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft4m3nb2jk/>; Benoît Turquety, Danièle Huillet et Jean-Marie Straub: “Objectivistes” en cinéma (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme, 2009) 537–78; and the website <http://straub-huillet.net/>.

10 The textual history of Hölderlin's work is exceptionally complex. For an accessible overview, see Hölderlin, The Death of Empedocles: A Mourning Play, trans. David Farrell Krell (Albany: State U of New York P, 2008). As Rembert Hüser explains in his “Stummfilm mit Sprache,” filmwärts 9 (1987): 17–23, the text used by Huillet and Straub in 1986 (and likewise in 1988) was their own, based on D.E. Sattler's Frankfurt Hölderlin edition, reviewed in the light of the original manuscripts. Bilingual German–French scripts for all three films appeared as follows: La Mort d’Empédocle (Toulouse: Ombres, 1986); Empédocle sur l’Etna (Toulouse: Ombres, 1989); and Antigone (Toulouse: Ombres, 1992).

11 On the different versions, see “Jean-Marie Straub zu seinem Film Der Tod des Empedokles,” Filmfaust XI.62 (1987) 10; Byg, Landscapes of Resistance 180; and Hüser, “Stummfilm mit Sprache” 20. Cameraman Jean-Paul Toraille's video diary, Avatars de “La Mort d’Empédocle” (1986), shows the logistical problems that faced actors and crew during the 1986 shoot.

12 See Manfred Blank, Wie will ich lustig lachen (1984).

13 See Karl H. Wörner, Schoenberg's “Moses and Aaron” (London: Faber, 1963) 103.

14 For analysis of the 1972 film, see Ursula Böser, The Art of Seeing, the Art of Listening: The Politics of Representation in the Work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet (Frankfurt: Lang, 2004).

15 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Musica ficta (figures de Wagner) (Paris: Bourgois, 1991) 222–23.

16 See Theodor Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, 20 vols. (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970–86) XVI: 454–75 (454).

17 See Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992).

18 Heidegger, Antwort. Martin Heidegger in Gespräch, ed. Günter Neske and Emil Kettering (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988) 81–114 (99–100).

19 See Georges Bataille, Œuvres complètes, 12 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1970–88) VI: 369.

20 Jean-Luc Nancy, Une pensée finie (Paris: Galilée, 1990) 67.

21 See Pierre Bertaux, Hölderlin und die Französische Revolution (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1969). Straub mentions Bertaux's work (without, however, naming him) in one of the question-and-answer sessions at the Reflet Médicis cinema in Paris recorded by Philippe Lafosse in his documentary Dites-moi quelque chose (2007–10).

22 See Hölderlin, Hyperion, Empedokles, Aufsätze, Übersetzungen, ed. Jochen Schmidt (Frankfurt: Deutscher Klassiker, 2008) 575–77 (577).

23 Straub and Huillet, “Cinéma [et] politique,” interview by François Albera (19 Mar. 2001), Leucothéa 1 (Apr. 2009): 146–66 (146).

24 Straub and Huillet, “Pourquoi Empédocle?” in Jean-Marie Straub. Danièle Huillet (n.p.: Antigone, 1990) 9–10 (10).

25 Ibid.

26 See Hüser, “Stummfilm mit Sprache” 20–21.

27 On parataxis in Hölderlin, see Adorno's famous essay with that selfsame title in Gesammelte Schriften XI: 447–91.

28 See Straub and Huillet, “Faire un plan. A propos du tournage de La Mort d’Empédocle” in Jean-Marie Straub. Danièle Huillet 79–93 (82, 85, 91); and “Conception d’un film” in Confrontations (Paris: FEMIS, 1990) 51–64.

29 Maurice Blanchot, La Part du feu (Paris: Gallimard, 1949) 124.

30 Hölderlin, Empédocle sur l’Etna 12.

31 See Rencontres avec Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet, ed. Jean-Louis Raymond (Paris: Beaux-arts, 2008) 20.

32 See Robert Savage, Hölderlin after the Catastrophe: Heidegger–Adorno–Brecht (Rochester: Camden, 2008).

33 Hölderlin, Sämtliche Gedichte 1033.

34 Bertolt Brecht, Materialien zur “Antigone” (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1965) 109.

35 See Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Métaphrasis, suivi de Le théâtre de Hölderlin (Paris: PUF, 1998) 24–25.